22 November 2018

Paul Jackson Head of Business Development First Group

Dear Paul

Hull Trains

Compliance with Condition 6 of your Station Licence and GB Statement of National Regulatory Provisions: Passenger

I am writing to you regarding the performance of Hull Trains and compliance with its complaints handling obligations.

As you will be aware, The 2015 ‘Guidance on Complaints Handling Procedures for Licence Holders’ (the Guidance) sets out that licence holders must respond to 95% of complaints within 20 working days. Our compliance monitoring data indicates that Hull Trains have now failed to meet this obligation since rail period 1 2018-19. In response to our previous request, you provided information to show how you intended to return to compliance and agreed to provide weekly reports on your progress in doing so.

Your most recent report of performance for rail period 7 shows that 14% of complaints were responded to within 20 working days, and your weekly reports indicate that there has been no improvement in performance. This demonstrates that the measures taken to date have not been successful in achieving the necessary compliance with the requirements.

Therefore, we ask that you provide a detailed, clear and achievable plan for improvement to swiftly meet and remain within the required timescale for responding to complaints.

In addition, there have been a number of issues with the accuracy of both the periodic and weekly data submissions throughout 2018-19. Data submitted to ORR should adhere to the published guidance for ORR Core Data compliance monitoring¹. I shall be grateful if you

¹ http://orr.gov.uk/\_\_data/assets/pdf_file/0006/27618/reference_guide_for_2018-19_orr_core_data_compliance_monitoring.pdf will supply details of the quality assurance measures you have in place which will ensure that in the future your data submissions are accurate.

Next steps

I shall be grateful if you will provide me with your plan to achieve compliance with the complaints handling requirements by **Friday 30 November 2018**.

Please note that this letter and your reply will be published on our website.

Yours sincerely

Marcus Clements